Have you ever wondered how successful
people get it all done? Apparently, they
don’t stint on their sleep in order to find extra hours in the day. But they do seem to get up earlier than the
rest of us, giving some credence to Ben Franklin’s saying: Early to bed and
early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
Forbes magazine looked at the sleep
habits of 21 people that most of us would consider successful—including
Franklin himself, who routinely went to bed at 10:00 PM and awoke promptly at
5:00 AM. The word “routinely” is
important; virtually everyone on the list was consistent about bedtime and
awakening time. Some sleep seven hours
like Franklin, including Winston Churchill (3:00 AM to 8:00 AM), Bill Gates
(midnight to 7:00 AM), Apple CEO Tim Cook (9:30 PM to 4:30 AM), Huffington Post
founder Arianna Huffington (10:00 PM to 5:00 AM), Twitter co-founder Jack
Dorsey (10:30 PM to 5:30 AM), and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos (10:00 PM to
5:00 AM).
People who sleep six hours a night
include U.S. President Barack Obama (1:00 AM to 7:00 AM), Yahoo! President
Marissa Mayer (midnight to 6:00 AM, but sometimes up by 4:00 AM), AOL CEO Tim
Armstrong (11:00 PM to 5:00 AM), Newton Investment Management CEO Helena
Morrissey (11:00 PM to 5:00 AM), and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk (1:00 AM to
7:00 AM).
Others sleep or slept only five hours,
among them Richard Branson (midnight to 5:00 AM), PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi
(11:00 PM to 4:00 AM), and inventor Thomas Edison (11:00 PM to 4:00 AM).
If you sleep eight hours a night,
you’re still in good company. That list
includes Virgin Money CEO Jayne-Anne Gadhia (10:30 PM to 6:30 AM), MediaCom UK
CEO Karen Blacklett (11:30 PM to 7:30 AM), software-as-a-service company Mor
founder Rand Fishkin (1:00 AM to 9:00 AM), digital networking guru Neil Patel
(11:00 PM to 7:00 AM); Ellen DeGeneres (11:00 PM to 7:00 AM) and Buffer
Software co-founder Leo Widrich (1:00 AM to 9:00 AM).
With a handful of exceptions, few of
these successful people are staying up late to catch the Late Show, Saturday
Night Live or the end of the NFL Monday Night Football game on the East
Coast. And few are sleeping past the
delivery of the morning paper—which means they’re getting a jump on the rest of
the world.
